Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and former director of the Children’s Behavior and Learning Clinic in Bellevue, Washington.

Tarico chairs Washington Women for Choice , serves on Planned Parenthood’s Board of Advocates, and is a Senior Writing Fellow at Sightline Institute, a think tank focused on sustainable prosperity. Her articles appear at sites including the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Salon, AlterNet, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and at her own blog, AwayPoint.

She once wrote that without abortion her daughter wouldn’t exist. Of her abortion she writes, “we got test results showing that I had acute toxoplasmosis. Probably not a big deal, right? We trucked ourselves over to the university library to find out. Turns out acute toxoplasmosis means possible blindness and brain lesions.

It seemed like a nightmare. We both wanted a baby. But it also felt irresponsible to gamble. Not only would we would be taking a chance on the quality of life of our first child, but potentially committing any future children to a life of caretaking that they had no option to choose or reject. We would be risking our own ability to give to the community around us – and possibly creating a situation in which our family needed to suck more out of society than we could put back into it. As painful as the decision felt, our moral values were clear, and we scheduled to terminate the pregnancy…In the case of my daughter, the trade-off is very clear: A bundle of risks, or the thriving life-lover who writes poetry about her chickens and races after a soccer ball as if, in that moment, it were the only thing that existed. There never was an option on both; Brynn was conceived before Gecko would have come to term. In less obvious ways, many many children exist in this world only because of abortion. We rarely talk of them – the chosen children who wouldn’t be here if their mothers hadn’t first chosen abortion when the timing or conditions were wrong. “

Tarico tells how she left evangelical Christianity for a non-religious belief system in this video below. Perhaps that drives her reasoning that killing her own child is acceptable.

Tarico believes that abortion is a blessing. In an article she published in the Huffington Post she explains, “If life is precious and helping our children to flourish is one of the most precious obligations we take on in life, then being able to stop an ill-conceived gestation is a sacred gift. Whether or not we are religious, deciding whether to keep or terminate a pregnancy is a process steeped in spiritual values: responsibility, stewardship, love, honesty, compassion, freedom, balance, discernment. But how often do we hear words like these coming from pro-choice advocates?”